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After the song and dance we made about our 11th birthday, this year we’re relatively subdued, because – after all – you don’t come to the site to read about us. Last time we were making up for our lack of plans for the “Tenth Anniversary” – an actual milestone worth celebrating.

That’s not to say we haven’t got a lot to celebrate this time around. We’ve had a fantastic 12 months with the site redesign, visitor numbers on the rise, a great range of coverage from Gamescom thanks to our team of writers, and indeed plenty of reviews on the site too. And not forgetting that we’ve been podcasting for over a year as well.

We have many plans for the future, with the long-talked about major overhaul around the corner. It may or may not happen within the next 12 months, but we’ll certainly be doing our best to give you plenty of previews, reviews, news, podcasts and more over the next year.

So, thanks to all who visit the website, and from myself as Editor, thanks to everyone who has contributed to the site. Happy Birthday allaboutgames.co.uk

As you may have noticed the latest edition of our podcast didn’t go live on Sunday as planned. This is down to internet troubles for two of our presenters which has made recording the podcast rather difficult. Other time limitations stopped us from putting together a podcast in time, but we will be trying to get it all together this week, in time for a release on Sunday 17th July.

The delay does give you more time to get in contact with us via e-mail or via Twitter. We’ll be talking about a variety of subjects, including the Xbox Live Summer of Arcade, and our recent reviews including FAST – Racing League, and our imminent thoughts on The Adventures of Shuggy.

Apologies for the delay, and we hope to return to our regular schedule after this.

Yes, it’s that time of year again. It’s time for the E3 Expo! If you don’t know, it’s one of the computer games industry’s biggest events of the year and as we do every year, we’ll have plenty of coverage from LA here on allaboutgames.co.uk. As in previous years we’ve put together a dedicated section, right here, except this time it has a snazzier logo. It also integrates with our YouTube account which we’ll be using through the event to post plenty of new videos of the latest games. We’ll also be making extensive use of our Twitter account too.

In fact, we’ll be liveblogging each of the pre-E3 press conferences from the three console makers via Twitter. You can follow us on @allaboutgamesuk for the latest. The press conferences will take place at the following times:

Microsoft – 1800 UK Time, Monday 6th June (1000 Local)

Sony – 0100 UK Time, Tuesday 7th June (1700 Monday Local)

Nintendo – 1700 UK Time, Tuesday 7th June (0900 Local)

All news items for the show will carry an “E3:” tag so you can easily keep track of things on your news reader. And lastly, we’ll have an E3 Special podcast online by the end of the week, nicely coinciding with the podcast’s first anniversary.

Finally, we bring you the new look allaboutgames.co.uk. We’ve been talking for a while about a redesign and we’ve finally brought the site more up to date with a refreshed look. Aside from the adjusted colours, we’ve also done a bit of tidy up with regards the sidebar, and made our Twitter and YouTube accounts more prominent as they play an increasingly important role in the site. The new coat of paint also introduces the new logo, which has been in use on parts of the site, and on our Twitter account, for some time.

This is, however, what the titles says – a fresh coat of paint – rather than a complete redesign. We know that modernisation of the site needs to go further, including deciding what features to introduce and what to remove. We have one of those redesigns in the planning stage, but we’re bringing you this refresh now because the old look had been with us for far too long.

You’ll have seen some of the changes come in before today, such as the change to the front page format and subsequently to its design, which have been parts of the plans for this new edition. You’ll also see some more changes we have planned coming along in the next month, including some new graphics and some further tidy up in certain areas.

So, we hope you like the new look allaboutgames.co.uk. Please let us know what you think via the usual methods – email and Twitter; we welcome compliments, complaints, suggestions, and, importantly, notifications of anything which breaks for you. And of course, we hope you continue to visit the website.

There’s been a little bit of coding behind the scenes we thought you should be aware of.

Firstly you’ve probably already noticed that there’s now a “Podcasts” link at the top of all pages on the site. It replaces the “Board” link, making it a good demonstration of what we’ve been focussing on in recent months. Right now, the discussion board is still alive, and can be accessed via the link on the left side menu. The podcasts, meanwhile, are released fortnightly and deserve their place on the top menu. They also deserved a proper index which can now be reached by clicking via that link, or the “View All Podcasts” link on the front page.

We’ve also put in a slight enhancement to the “All Reviews”, “All Previews” and “All Cheats” pages (again, accessible via the links at the top and the links at the bottom of the front page). They will now show the latest reviews/previews/cheats so, for example, you can see what’s been reviewed recently after it rolls off the front page due to news items and podcasts, etc. It’s a minor addition, but we think it’s a useful feature we should have had a while ago.

There’s still a visual overhaul on the way, but these changes should mark some of the last additions before our overhaul later this year. We hope you like the changes and additions, and welcome comments below.

Just a quick post to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Naturally we’ll be posting a bit less over the next couple of days or so, but we’ve still got plenty of content lined up in the run up to New Year, and of course, beyond. This includes more reviews, a DLC Digest, maybe some news, and an article about what we think are the best games of 2010. That last one is due to go live on New Year’s Day, so stay tuned to the site for that.

Thank you also to everyone for your support in 2010 – it’s a been a great year for the site, including taking on new staff and launching the podcast. Let’s hope 2011 is even better!

Today, Friday 22nd October, we celebrate 11 years of operation here at allaboutgames.co.uk. Starting back in the era of the original PlayStation in 1999, we’ve been going since with various designs, staff and ideas, but I’m still here as always.

The site has had its ups and downs over the years due to the availability of the staff, but I believe we’re on an up now, with a stronger contributing team delivering more regularly, and of course our fortnightly podcast which launched earlier this year.

I wanted to say thank you to all the contributors over the past 11 years, and we look forward to bringing you many more reviews, previews, news items, podcasts, and more over the coming years.

As part of the birthday weekend we have some special features on the site:

A special birthday competition

A quick retrospective of the site through the years

A feature on how we make our podcast to tie in with Episode 10

Episode 10 of the podcast (OK, that’s a regular feature)

We’ll also have more news and reviews as usual, and we hope you’ll keep visiting the site in the years ahead. And yes, some visual changes are also around the corner…

Last year we brought you a few previews, and a load of “Tweet previews” from Gamescom. This year we’re going all out on a dedicated section, and aim to bring you lots more hands-on previews straight from the event. So follow that section for a range of gamescom news and previews, but you’ll also get more from the show floor by following our Twitter feed. We’ll even put some videos on our YouTube channel too.

So we hope you enjoy the coverage, and stay tuned for lots more from Gamescom over the next few days.

The podcast is now well established on the website, so from Episode 5 we’re moving fully to a regular schedule. Starting next Sunday, 15th August, you’ll be able to get a fortnightly dose of myself, Andy Daniel, Richard Pilot, and anyone who joins us.

The new regular schedule also brings a new regular editor. Andy is taking over from the rotating shifts as he becomes “Creative Editor” on the website, responsible for producing each podcast episode as well for the upcoming redesign.

Just as we were getting into the stream of releasing podcasts on fortnightly Sundays we go and run into a technical issue. Episode 4 of the allaboutgames.co.uk podcast has been delayed by a few days due to problems caused by someone managing to delete their part of the podcast. As you might imagine this is a bit of a issue for putting together our recordings and producing the final piece of work for you all to cherish. Ironically, it was the turn of this very person to edit the podcast this time…

In related news, a failed graphics card meant that my desktop, complete with the Skype-produced backup, is also out of action, adding to the fun – and also stopping me from playing StarCraft II. However, we hope to rebuild the pieces and deliver Episode 4 later this week.